Nineteen Eighty Four

I found a book that the government officials didn't take.  I almost wish they had.

When I was a young man, entering into the first few years of what would be a very drawn out and tumultuous college education, three books had a very significant impact on my young psyche.  Those books were Milton's Paradise Lost (I had a whole class on it,) Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (don't mention Ayn Rand in polite conversation, it WILL turn ugly,) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.

The book I found was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.

Like all books that used to belong to Henry, Nineteen Eighty Four is filled to overflowing with marginalia.  When I first found it, I hugged it tight against my chest.  This must have been the feeling that Winston (the main character of 1984) felt when he discovered the blank journal.

The first time Winston writes in the journal, he hides in a small alcove out of view of the telescreen in his tiny apartment and enters a fugue state of furious scribbling.  Henry had a lot to say about this telescreen:

"Winston, my friend, we must always be vigilant.  They are always watching.  They hate what you cherish because it gives you hope.  I envy you, Winston, for though you face death for your tiny treason, the Lords that watch for me can excise hope with surgery like it was a cancer. By their knife I cannot love, cannot cherish, cannot hope.  I can only pine for the days when such vivid emotions colored my world.  Now I see the world as if through a thick haze, as if the windows of my eyes were distant from the perception of my injured soul.  What colors do you see?  Love, Winston, and do not fear your death.  Oblivion is more merciful than the purgatory of my existance."

Were those men that came for Henry's books, were they really trying to help him or are they responsible for his disappearance?

It seems to me that they took his books not to find some clue to his whereabouts, but to conceal any evidence on where he might be taken.

Does this sort of thing really happen? Does our government really do this sort of thing? It is more than I can comprehend.

I think I've been reading the trade forums, too much.  Their conspiracy theories are getting to me.  Our government can't even balance a budget, a topic taught in junior high school.

Good luck Henry, wherever you are.

A.P.B.

Though I left Henry a message on our book trading website, I ended up posting a general forum message about Henry's sudden disappearance.  Immediately the whole forum leapt into action.  A subforum was even created to discuss Henry's disappearance.

I'm floored at the forum's reaction.  It is clear to me, now, that my life isn't the only one that Henry touched.  All of these men and women who had these brief interactions with Henry, he had left a mark on all of them.  I wonder if it was his earnest enthusiasm for books that touched them, his blunt, honest-to-a-fault demeanor, or something else.

I don't know.

Some of the threads on the forum have begun to speculate on what happened to Henry, where he went.  Of course, it's the internet, and so dozens of conspiracy theories have been posited. I don't really believe any of these, of course.  I think it's just a case of Henry failing to realize that there are people that care about him and that he should communicate his moving to them.

Whatever the case, I know Henry's still out there and I have faith that we will contact each other, again.

Still Blown Away

I'm still stunned at Henry's sudden and unexplainable disappearance.  I'm certain he wasn't kidnapped or that he fell in a ditch someplace.  His house is completely empty, every bit of it.  His car is gone.  Those aren't signs of an accidental disappearance.  He left.

I don't know his neighbors well, but I felt obligated to ask.  No-one on the block knew Henry, few had ever seen him, and none of them remembered seeing any moving trucks or anything being carried out of his house.

It is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen.

I've left a message for him on our book trading site.  I'm certain he'll come back there after he gets settled in.  I'm not even sure he knows how leaving like this could upset someone.

Marginalia

Marginalia isn't just for the inane ramblings of pretentious readers or the scribblings of bored school boys.  It is a method of communication that has been practiced for centuries.  The marginalia of several authors and critics have been published as books in their own right.

With the advent of Kindle and electronic books, the habit is in danger of disappearing.  I did notice that my Kindle offers the feature to highlight passages and comment on them.  These comments join a cloud of similar comments from similar readers online.  I have the option to choose to read my ebooks with these comments enabled.  Somehow the feature does not have the same charm as classic marginalia.  The "in-line" nature of the comments is also somewhat distracting, though some methods of classic marginalia do involve the mark-up of passages "in-line."

What is marginalia, Nick?  You may be asking yourself that.

According to Webster:
mar·gi·na·lia noun plural \ˌmär-jə-ˈnā-lē-ə\

Definition of MARGINALIA
1: marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book)
2: nonessential items <the meat and marginalia of American politics — Saturday Review>

In very simple terms, marginalia is someone writing in the margins of their books.  Historically, this has been happening for a very long time.  It can be as simple as a student highlighting passages in his text book (a specialized form of marginalia known as scholia) or a reader penning his thoughts and critique in the margins as he reads.

This latter form is particularly note-worthy.  Reading a book with this type of marginalia is like watching a DVD with commentary.  Often times, this will be that readers first time with the book and you can watch as that person's opinions change and mature through the course of reading the book.

Edgar Allen Poe published a number of his musings, reflections, and fragmental poetry in a volume titled "Marginalia."

Voltaire penned an entire book in the margins of another while he was in prison, due a lack of paper.

Several authors have written "Annotated" volumes, their commentary of other authors works, with passages that could be described as marginalia.  Of course I'm a fan of Asimov's Annotated series of books.  As was Henry.

Perhaps most famously, Samuel T. Coleridge was renown for his habit of marginalia and a number books edited with his marginalia have been published.  He was a fairly serious opium addict and some of these passages are very enlightening into the mindset of the barely lucid.

I would post a scan of one of Henry's mark-ups but sadly I do not have those books any more.  He was very much interested in the concept of human love.  I used to own a copy of Malory's Le Morte De Arthur in which he had heavily annotated.  He had extreme difficult understanding the concepts of love as described in those pages.  Particularly troubling to him was the story of The Lady of Astolat.

I remember this in particular not because he was troubled at The Lady's death, but at how he envied her capacity for emotion.  No, he was troubled that he had never felt even a fraction of the love and devotion that Elaine had felt.  It was a sensation he found so alien and so enviable at the same time.

He often spoke of emotion as a spectrum of perception.  Just as some peoples' vision is more keen than others, perhaps some people experience vivid or muted emotions.  In this metaphor, Henry described himself as emotionally blind, unable to experience the vivid and moving colors of emotion that others cherished.

His was a world without light.

I remember that comment in his marginalia in particular.  "Mine is a world without light."

Gone.

Henry's Gone.

He's Just Gone.

He's Just Disappeared.

This happened a few weeks ago and until now, it hadn't occurred to me that I should keep blogging about him.  My blog is due to be reviewed by my professor soon and I suppose I don't have any choice but to keep going.

It's like he's just took off.

I'm very upset.

Though I know Henry could not care for me in the way I care for him, that doesn't make this any easier.  He should have said something, anything.  He should have let me know he was going.

I'm not the only one who was shocked.  The police... no, they weren't the police, they made certain to repeat that several times.  Some kind of government officials visitted my appartment, a few weeks ago.  They were looking for Henry, too.  They asked if I had anything of his, anything that might give them some clue about where he'd gone.  One of them noticed a book I had open on the kitchen table.

They took them all.  Any book that Henry had written in, they took them.  I suppose I should have argued, but they said that any of them might contain clues on where Henry might have gone.  They assured me that I'd get the books back after they reviewed them.  They gave me a blank cared with a number on it.

I'm supposed to call if I remember anything.

I'm so upset.  Here is a scan of the article in the paper describing his disappearance.

Over tonight and the weekend, I'm going to continue blogging about Henry.  This will be in part due to my obligations to my Technical Writing course, but also in honor of him.  Wherever he is, I'm sure that he will find a place to squirrel himself away and hide from the world in a satisfying manner.

My next blog will be about marginalia, a habit that Henry adored.

Mk Ultra

Project Mk Ultra was a CIA program into the manipulation of human behavior through a variety of methods for the purposes of controlling individuals and extracting information from unwilling interviewees.  Several methods were experimented with at a huge assortment of civilian institutions including prisons, hospitals, and colleges.  The methods utilized involved psychotropic drugs, verbal and sexual abuse, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation.  This was all done without the knowledge of the President, Gerald Ford, and he even launched an investigation into these programs with chilling results.

I had asked Henry to describe to me the most difficult part of his condition was.  He was lax to call it a condition.  Though he had seen a psychologist many years ago who diagnosed him with this condition, he felt that it was more a way of life or a philosophy.  Still, Henry describes a frustrating element of his life.  From his viewpoint, people are inherently unknowable.  Their behavior is confusing to him to the point that it seems alien.  They are emotional and interconnected.  People define themselves by the relationships they have and it is a concept that is difficult to for him to identify with, being a largely solitary person.

It is an issue for people who try to get close to him, too.  I am not the first.  Many people have reached out to him over the years, thinking that he was merely shy or reserved.  What they found was an emotional coldness and a profound lack of interest in developing personal relationships.  Most painful would be those individuals who sought romantic relationships with Henry and who would struggle against his isolation and emotional coldness in a futile attempt to connect with him.

He described a relationship he had with a woman, once, a beautiful, patient woman that he thought possessed the long-suffering virtue required to cope with his emotional distance.  He described, as if relating a story from one of his books, in cool, calm, unaffected tone, of a sexual encounter with this woman, where he sought to give her what she desired.  She had given so much of herself to him and he appreciated it, he wanted to give back to her.  Feeling that she valued a sexual relationship with her, he submitted to her advances.

He was there, he said, physically, but the intimacy she sought was not.  His mind, the real part of him, had withdrawn into his interior space.  He could perceive that things were happening to him, potentially wonderful things, but his reaction to her intense emotional vulnerability caused him to recoil from her and escape into his own mind.

In the end, these clumsy, passionless encounters would fail to satisfy.  She would tell him that she could look into his eyes and see that he was not with her anymore and it frustrated her that she could not follow after him when he retreated like that.  He could recognize the pain in her, but to him is was nothing more than the confusing, alien behavior of people he could not understand.  What he felt was relief from the anxiety of constantly trying to be for her what he could not.  He would staunchly refuse the advances of any woman for the rest of his life.  He was in his late twenties at the time.

Henry described a story he once read that used Project Mk Ultra as a plot element. The Project in this book removed the emotional capabilities from the subjects they experimented on in an effort to make them cold, calculating killers.  The book explored the lives of these pitiable subjects and the relationships that fell apart around them when they were unable to emotionally connect with the people in their lives.

Henry identified with these fictional characters and joked about the same, that he had had his emotions destroyed and lays in wait as a sleeper agent for the government to activate his hypnotically implanted assassin training.

It wasn't a very good joke, but I laughed.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

First and foremost, Schizoid Personality Disorder, while it shares common causation and mechanical characteristics, is distinct from Schizophrenia and Schizotypical Personality Disorder. In particular, it lacks the delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia that typify these other conditions.  It is -not- dangerous.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Schizoid Personality Disorder is characterized by the following traits. To be diagnosed with this condition, a patient must have four of the following:

1. Emotional coldness, detachment or reduced affect.
2. Limited capacity to express either positive or negative emotions towards others.
3. Consistent preference for solitary activities.
4. Very few, if any, close friends or relationships, and a lack of desire for such.
5. Indifference to either praise or criticism.
6. Taking pleasure in few, if any, activities.
7. Indifference to social norms and conventions.
8. Preoccupation with fantasy and introspection.
9. Lack of desire for sexual experiences with another person.

 In my interactions with Henry, numbers 2, 3, and 8 were almost immediately apparent.  Even in my email and message-board conversations with Henry, it was clear he had little interest in interpersonal exchange.  Where most of the message-board was alive with discussions about new and interesting acquisitions, Henry's visits were short and to the point, brokering a book trade and signing off.

It became clear to me that the fictions he imagined and populated with these books were far more valuable to him. Indeed, I would find that his books were littered with marginalia.  As our trade forum was routinely fond of lamenting, printed books seemed to be on the way out, replaced by a Kindle era.  Kindle seemed an ironic name for the e-reader du jour, as it may be turning our books into kindling.  With the passage of printed books from vogue, marginalia would disappear as well, a practice Henry engaged in with passion.

I now own a few of Henry's books (including my Hitchhiker's Guide) which include his marginalia in them.  The conversations he has with these texts are fascinating to the point that I've suggested he publish his own series of Annotated Works in the vein of Asimov's.

Now that I have had an opportunity to know Henry for a good while, I believe he rates a 9-out-of-9 rating in the DSM for Schizoid Personality Disorder.  In later entries in this blog, I would like to focus on a few of these symptoms, the ones that may be particularly difficult for friends of those with SPD to deal with.

These Dreams

Sorry for the radio silence in recent weeks.  I received a dream commission to work for one of the higher profile RPG properties and to put my usual writing process to work, I had to hide, completely petrified with fear, and get nothing done for several weeks.  My process is highly efficient, as you can see.

Last time I spoke about my friend Henry Darger, it was to discuss his name-sake, the real life Henry Darger.  Of all the attributes Real Henry Darger possesses, My Henry Darger shares his anonymity.  Few will ever know My Henry Darger, and he seems pretty content with that.  It was only through the magic of the internet that I was able to discover him and though I know he will always be distant and aloof, his eccentricities are endearing to me and I am quite glad I know him.

My Henry Darger (who I will now simply refer to as Henry, please try to keep up) suffered some water damage to his home.  A few years ago, there were some storm-water issues in Chicago and water backed up into his tiny townhouse and ruined several books he had been storing.  Henry possesses quite a library, if you are into pulp fiction, serial fiction, gothic literature, or horror. (I hate Byron, but love Shelley.)

One of the books that Henry lost was Isaac Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost.  Turns out that this book is a bit hard to get a hold of unless you're willing to lay out five hundred clams.  I should know, I did.  Paradise Lost is one of two books that I feel had a dramatic effect on my young mind and heavily influenced my current opinions on religion.  Isaac Asimov is brilliant mind and self professed "humanist" and in his annotation of Paradise Lost helps illuminate all the disparate allusions densely clustered in this epic poem.

Unwilling to part from this book, Henry went to the internet and through a website dedicated to book trading, found me.  Paradise Lost is dense and difficult to read and when I was contacted by this man who clearly shared my esteem for the epic poem, I was excited to find someone else who was able to penetrate its steely hide and extract its delicious, metaphoric nougat.

After setting up the details of the trade (I would receive a first edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) we arranged to meet.  Since we didn't live incredibly far from each other, we decided to meet in person to exchange the books.

Even from that first meeting, it was clear to me that Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and John Milton were more real to him than even me sitting right in front of him.  These are men he had been having conversations with, deep, philosophical conversations and they existed in a reality apart from the one I inhabited. 

Reality is the correct word to describe this world, I would learn.  It is as real and coherent as mine.  People may talk about how the truth is different based on the perspectives of those who view it.  I'm reminded of the movie, "Rashomon."  Henry say the world from a distance, as if through a fog.  Much more clear and real to him, was the world interior.  Douglas, Isaac, and John (all men who are deceased in this exterior reality) inhabited this world and the doorway into their insights were the books he had collected.

Far more than real people, Henry valued the relationships he had with his book.  At least that was my initial impression.  Over the years I would discover that it wasn't these books he valued so highly, but the fantasies they inhabited in his own internal world.

"These dreams go on when I close my eyes
Every second of the night I live another life
These dreams that sleep when it's cold outside
Every moment I'm awake the further I'm away"
        -Heart

In the Realms of the Unreal

I choose the alias "Henry Darger" for my aquaintance in honor of Chicago's own Henry Darger.  Never heard of him?  I'm not surprised.  There is, however, a museum. Well, there are actually several museums.  The works of Henry Darger are on permanent display at the Chicago Institute of Art and the Outsider Art Project at Intuit, as well as several other prominent art institutions across the country.  In the appreciation of "Outsider Art," Henry Darger is a superstar, but he sure didn't live like one.

Intuit took possession of all the items in Henry Darger's modest living space and recreated the room:

The Henry Darger Room

Henry Darger was an orphan, his mother dying while he was very young, his father impoverished and unable to care for him.  He spent some time in an orphanage before being moved to a psychiatric asylum after his care-takers expressed "his heart was not right."  There he was subjected to the forced labor and harsh punishments that exemplified institutions of this type in the early twentieth century.

He would later escape the asylum at the age of 16 and find employment with a Catholic Hospital as a janitor.  He would work there until his retirement 51 years later.

It was in this time that Henry Darger took up residence in a room in Lincoln Park, not far from Du Paul university, and write the staggeringly long "In the Realms of the Unreal." This enormous work was typed on 15,145 pages and comprised fifteen weighty volumes.  These are accompanied by detailed personal journals, weather journals, and letters he exchanged with his (and what would seem to be his only) friend, a Mr. William Shloder.

"In the Realms of the Unreal" describes a world of magical creatures, one populated by free, happy children who are forced to rebel against a nation of monstrous tyrants engaged in child slavery.  The text is a panoramic view into the vivid, highly detailed, imaginary world that Henry Darger coexisted in.  Accompanying these texts are surreal water-color paintings, hundreds in total, where tracing of children taken out of newspapers and magazines are painted into colorful and bizarre landscapes, showing a sharp contrast between the realistic children and the magical world they existed in.

No-one knew this incredible work existed until shortly before his death, when he was hospitalized with growing ailments, and his landlords debated what to do with his possessions should he die.  A journalist recognized the great artistic merit of this enormous work and was able to preserve it.

Though this Henry Darger is often diagnosed (by psychologists, today, looking back on his solitary, eccentric life) as autistic, with Asperger's Syndrome, he has many qualities in common with MY Henry Darger.

In particular, this Henry Darger's magnus opus, a gigantic 15,000 page epic, was inspired by his loss of newspaper clipping of a little girl.  This loss was symbolized in his tale as the murder of that girl, a murder that would spark a violent war between children and monsters.  These fifteen volumes, which would take him ten years to write, all sprang from the theft (alleged) of this simple newsprint photograph.

My Henry Darger lost something, too.  And that's how he found me.

Henry Darger

Welcome to the inaugural post of my blog: Project MK-Ultra!

This blog is meant to satifsy the requirements of my Technical Writing Course ENG420.

In deciding what I was going to blog about, I had a few different ideas.  At first I was going to write about my love for Alternative Country Music, a genre of music misunderstood by Alternative Music and Country Music fans both.  Chicago is home to an incredible Alt-Country Band, Wilco, and I planned to name my blog in honor of their seminal album "No Depression."

Then, seeing interest from my professor regarding my part-time career as a pencil jockey for the pen-and-paper games industry, I thought about writing about my experiences there.  I decided few people would want to read about how many tons of light lasers a Clan Vulture mech loads out, whether High Elves and Eladrin are the same species or not, or what Shadowrunners are really referring to when they discuss 'Essence.'

It was as I was contemplating this blog that I was contacted by an acquaintance of mine.  I use the term acquaintance because those individuals suffering from Schizoid Personality Disorder rarely form friendships in the traditional sense.Though it's unlikely that anyone reading this blog will know this man, I will be referring to him using an alias.

Henry Darger is that man living in that house on your block that you've never met.  He's the man you work with, but never see outside of work, the one who never talks about his family, girlfriend, wife, or friends and by all accounts has none.  He gets up, goes to work, goes home, and cloisters himself away from the rest of the world and the people in it.  He's a hermit.

It is difficult to say how many people in the world suffer from Schizoid Personality Disorder because the disorder is marked by secretiveness and self-reliance.  Those who suffer from the disorder rarely seek assistance and so the professional community has difficulty counting them.

Henry Darger is a man that suffers from this disorder and this blog will be dedicated to my experiences with this man.  He has agreed to allow me to interview him, but those interviews will not appear here in transcript form.  Instead this blog will take a journalistic form as I explore my relationship with Henry Darger, discuss his way of life, his thoughts and feelings, and my own personal musings.  My goal is to reveal the existence of this hidden disorder and encourage understanding in those who may meet similarly eccentric and private individuals.